Compositional features

Use of deviant language on all levels.

Strong emotional colouring.

Loose syntactical organisation of an utterance.

Frequently little coherence or adherence to the topic.

No special compositional patterns.

27. Stylistics of the author and the reader. Types of narration

A work of creative prose is never homogeneous as to the form and essence of the information it carries. Both very much depend on the viewpoint of the addresser, as the author and his personages may offer different angles of perception of the same object. Natu­rally, it is the author who organizes this effect of polyphony, but we, the readers, while reading the text, identify various views with various personages, not attributing them directly to the writer. The latter's views and emotions are most explicitly expressed in the author's speech (or the author's narrartive ). The unfolding of the plot is mainly concentrated here, personages are given characteris­tics, the time and the place of action are also described here, as the author sees them. The author's narrative supplies the reader with direct information about the author's preferences and objections, beliefs and contradictions, i.e. serves the major source of shaping up the author's image.

In contemporary prose, in an effort to make his writing more.plausible, to impress the reader with the effect of authenticity of the described events, the writer entrusts some fictitious character (who might also participate in the narrated events) with the task of story-telling. The writer himself thus hides behind the figure of the narrator, presents all the events of the story from the latter's viewpoint and only sporadically emerges in the narrative with his own considerations which may reinforce, or contradict those ex­pressed by the narrator. This form of the author's speech is called entrusted narrative. The structure of the entrusted narrative is much more complicated than that of the author's narrative proper, because instead of one commanding, organizing image of the author, we have the hierarchy of the narrator's image seemingly arranging the pros and contras of the related problem and, looming above the narrator's image, there stands the image of the author, the true and actual creator of it all, responsible for all the views and evaluations of the text and serving the major and predominant force of textual cohesion and unity.

Entrusted narrative can be carried out in the 1st person singular, when the narrator proceeds with his story openly and explicitly, from his own name, as, e.g., in The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, or The Great Gatsby by Sc. Fitzgerald, or All the King's Men by R. P. Warren. In the first book Holden Caulfield himself retells about the crisis in his own life which makes the focus of the novel. In the second book Nick Carraway tells about Jay Gatsby, whom he met only occasionally, so that to tell Gatsby's life-story he had to lean on the knowledge of other personages too. And in the third book Jack Burden renders the dramatic career of Willie Stark, himself being one of the closest associates of the man. In the first case the narration has fewer deviations from the main line, than in the other two in which the narrators have to supply the reader also with the information about themselves and their connection with the protagonist.

Entrusted narrative may also be anonymous. The narrator does not openly claim responsibility for the views and evaluations but the manner of presentation, the angle of description very strongly suggest that the story is told not by the author himself but by some of his factotums, which we see, e. g., in the prose of Fl. O'Connor, C. McCullers, E. Hemingway, E. Caldwell.

28. Stylistics and discourse

Discourse is a complex communicative speech activity aimed at solving pragmatic and cognitive tasks. The results of this activity are considered with the help of language means in oral and written texts.

Elena Manayenko includes four components in the structure of discourse:

1) environment;

2) social subject with its social status and relations with other participants of the communicative process;

3) content (it presupposes information and aims of communication);

4) text (it includes theme, genre and language means).

Discourse is not purely linguistic phenomenon. It is the concept of theory of communication. Discourse doesn’t obligatory end with a text as its result. The result may be some decision expressed by a non-verbal action or fact. Discourse is non-finite, while the text is finite. The text is created in the discourse and is viewed as its result.

There are various types of discourse: everyday, poetic, publicist, scientific, graphic, advertising, etc. Tatyana Leonova states that functional styles according to Galperin can be presented as functional divisions of graphic discourse, as they belong to written language in use.

According to the major function, the following division of graphical discourse is distinguished:

1. Entertaining. It is presented by the form of belles-lettres and deals with mock-reality, performing the aesthetic function. There may be optional pragmatic functions. For example, the texts in this discourse may be also persuasive.

2. Persuasive. It is presented by memoirs, letters to the editor and feature articles. As optional, it may perform emotive and aesthetic functions.

3. Historically informative and impartial. Here we refer newspaper reports which are expected to be impartial and informative, but never persuasive.

4. Postulating and argumentative. Here we refer scientific literature which is supposed to be impartial and informative.

5. Formalizing and binding. Here we refer official documents which are aimed at arranging the terms of undertaking and binding the parties involved.

29. Set expressions. Proverbs and sayings

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